This Friday, while I was taking my lunch break from work, my mother called to let me know that my father, Jayant Lele, had peacefully passed away.

His health had been failing for a while. It got so bad in January that we expected to be saying goodbye to him then; miraculously he survived that, but he never made anything close to a full recovery. So we knew this was coming, but we didn’t know when, which put a lot of stress on all of us.

These last months have been the hardest. I got several chances to visit this year, which I’m very grateful for. (My parents have continued living in Kingston, Ontario, where I grew up, while I live in metro Boston now.) Those visits felt to me like I imagine raising a child must feel: difficult and frustrating, but rewarding.

I inherit my intellectualism from my father. Ideas were almost always at the heart of my relationship with him. I find it a lot easier to relate to children once I can have conversations with them, and he was the same. He did play with me when I was a small child – I fondly remember the Marathi version of “this little piggy” – but we really connected once I was old enough to start talking about his true loves, politics and political philosophy. Which, in my case, was about age twelve, maybe younger. Even by age five or so, I had imbibed enough of my parents’ left-wing anti-authoritarian spirit that I decided I would always call them by their first names, Jayant and Dorothy, and so it has been ever since. By the time I was taking economics classes in high school, I did my class projects on Marxist economics, following Jayant’s lead, using his books. As I came into my own intellectually, we had plenty of arguments: unlike him, I found individual ethical cultivation much more important than politics, in part because I came to believe the dark tendencies in human nature are deep enough that no political organization will overcome them. But those arguments were themselves a way that we could respect and engage and learn from each other.

All of that is what made these last months most difficult for me. Every year for many years, for his birthday I have given him a book in political philosophy that I thought he would like, and he read them and usually did enjoy them. Last year Michael Lazarus came to Harvard and gave a wonderful talk on his book Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx, which I was very excited about having my father read: I knew Jayant would enjoy probing deeper into the earlier underpinnings of Marx’s thought, and with my own love of Aristotle and Hegel I hoped we could have great conversations about it. So when he turned 90 this May, I gave him a copy of Lazarus’s book.

The problem was that – and I knew this at the time – he was in no mental condition to read it. He had recently had his leg amputated due to a deadly and crippling infection, and the hydromorphone he took for the pain was dulling his mind enough that he couldn’t even read a newspaper, let alone an abstract and challenging work of philosophy. When I gave him the book, I told him it was aspirational: it was with the hope, viable at the time, that he would recover sufficiently to read and enjoy it.

That never happened, alas. These last few months, his mind was addled enough that he often forgot what was said to him two minutes before. Talking to him when he was 90 felt like how it must have been to talk to me when I was four. There was no room for complex ideas to get through. It was painful seeing him in that state.

And yet, in that same state the relationship also became something new. Unlike me, my father had never been a deeply emotional person. But in those last months he cried a great deal – in a way that felt good and touching to me, because they were most commonly tears of gratitude and appreciation for my presence, and for that of others who came to help him. Above all, there was the time just a couple weeks ago when he turned to me, his voice full of deep emotion, and said, “Thank you for being my son.” I looked back into his eyes and said, “Thank you for being my father.”

That was not something either of us had ever said before. In the many preceding decades, I don’t think we had ever connected on such a visceral and emotional level. Maybe with all the exciting exchanges of ideas in the past, we hadn’t needed to. But with the ideas gone, there, newly bared below it all, was simply the raw bond of father and son. I will cherish that moment for as long as I’m still around.

Thank you, Jayant, for being my father.